Page 107 of Long Way Down

“Aren’t you bright eyed and bushy-tailed,” he greeted, to which she wrinkled her nose. “And come bearing gifts, I see.” He lifted the cup and saluted her with it. “Thanks.”

“I got a call at one a.m. from Dana Peterson.”

He paused, cup halfway to his mouth, as her sentence landed, and then he dropped down in his chair and leaned forward. “You what?”

She gave him the rundown of her post-midnight activities, and he was frowning by the end.

“You should have called me. I could have gone with you.”

She waved him off. “Figured you were asleep.” Before he could protest – and he looked like he wanted to – she added, “I took the tissue by the lab already. It’s probably a contaminated sample, and totally unrelated to the case…”

“But better to cover all the bases,” he said with a nod.

“Yeah. Could take a while for the results to come in.”

“Doesn’t it always?” He took a sip of his latte and frowned. “Dana’s really not doing well, is she?”

Melissa thought of her watery, red-rimmed eyes, the hands shaking on her coffee mug. Her insistence that she’d seen someone out there, watching her. “No. I wish there was something I could do for her.”

“You can: you can find this guy who’s terrorizing women.”

“Yeah, obviously. But.” She tapped her pen on her desk, hands full of restless energy, despite her physical exhaustion. “She needs real help. We can find him and arrest him, but Dana’s still going to be messed up. I wish the boyfriend had been there last night and I’d had a chance to talk to him.”

“That’s not our job here,” he said, sympathetic, but firm.

Her turn to frown. “You’re gonna tell me that Mr. Pep Talk” – she nodded toward him – “doesn’t believe in going above and beyond the call of duty.”

“First off, I’m choosing to take that as a compliment. And secondly: there’s going above and beyond…and then there’s getting sucked into someone else’s disaster and getting stuck there. I’ve seen it happen before. A few years back, a detective here – a damn good one, too – took an interest in a victim. Single mom, a dancer who got assaulted. The case wrapped up, and everyone thought that was that…but then she called the precinct looking for him, said he was ‘late with the money.’ Her shitbag ex owed her child support, and Detective Romero was paying it. Just until she got on her feet, he said, but he’d been funneling his paychecks to her and had to ask around because he couldn’t pay his own rent.”

“Shit,” she murmured.

“Yeah. Guy lost his shield. I don’t know what happened to him.” He shook his head. “I know you wanna help – that’s what makes you a good cop – and I know that Dananeedshelp…but it can’t come from you directly. It can’t be personal for us.” He gestured over toward the far wall, where fliers fluttered on the corkboard beneath the AC draft. “There’s some groups that meet, for women like her. And some pretty good community centers where she could talk to someone for free.”

“Yeah,” Melissa said, unconvinced.

“Anyway,” he continued, “as of right now, she’s not one of our vics, and we have our hands full with them already.”

~*~

Lana and Lynn had both been released from the hospital.

Lana was planning to go to class tonight.

Lynn was not.

Her mother met them at the front door dressed in pale khakis and a navy sweater set, pearls looped around her throat and dangling from her ears. Her hair gleamed, freshly styled, and her makeup had been meticulously applied, but it couldn’t hide the dark pouches beneath her eyes, nor the lines around her eyes and mouth that had deepened over the past few days thanks to stress. She had a scraped-out hollowness to her face; stood with shoulders stooped and elbows tucked in, aged by the shock of her daughter’s attack.

She glanced between them. “Good morning.” Her voice indicated it was anything but. “Please, come in.”

The crime scene tape was down, and the house had a fresh-scrubbed look about it, wood surfaces gleaming, metallic ones bright and slick as glass, free of even the tiniest fingerprint smudge. People like the Wheatlys employed housekeeping crews, and Melissa had no doubt that once the lab techs had cleared out, trailing fingerprint dust and lift tape, the cleaners had come in for a complete and total sanitization of the whole house. The air was cool, and smelled of lemon solvent and beeswax.

Mrs. Wheatly shut and locked the door – there was a new, second deadbolt, Melissa noticed – and then hovered in past them like a nervous moth, hands clasped together in front of her. “Would you like some coffee?”

They’d already decided that Contreras would be the one to handle her, him being better with mothers. “No, thank you, we’ve just had some. Is there a place where we can talk with Lynn?”

She took a big, shuddering breath and gripped onto her wrists, rings flashing cold in the early light. “She’s up in her room. She doesn’t…” She gulped. “She doesn’t want me to listen when you ask her about it.”

Melissa was glad for that, and couldn’t say she blamed the girl.